Upwards and onwards: Digital transformation at Manchester Airports Group

Shifting the ERP to the cloud is the first step to modernising procurement and finance says head of technology Risk Alkunshalie

"My job is about creating and enabling journeys," said Risk Alkunshalie, head of technology, enterprise, at Manchester Airports Group (MAG).

His being a tech role, Alkunshalie is not directly involved in ferrying passengers to sunnier climes or moving goods around the world from MAG's three airports. Rather, he supports those operations from the systems side, ensuring the 60 million people and vast tonnage of cargo that pass annually through Manchester, East Midlands and Stansted do so with the minimum of friction.

It's about employee journeys too, smoothing the HR and finance and procurement processes, and managing systems for ordering, stock control, contracts, people, transport and security.

Central to all this are some heavyweight enterprise applications, ERP, HR systems, CRM, procurement, service desk and many more beside, and MAG has been on its own journey to integrate these systems and digitise and automate manual processes.

A multistage journey

Digitisation is a journey without end, and one with many stopping off points. The last major staging post was the implementation of an organisation-wide SAP ECC6 ERP in 2015, in partnership with CapGemini. This was to integrate Stansted, which MAG acquired in 2013, into the rest of the system, and to underpin a range of modernisation efforts which are now well under way.

The current phase is defined by interoperability. Large enterprise systems have the unfortunate habit of breeding silos. MAG's technology plan, under CIO Nick Woods, is to avoid this by ensuring all the systems can talk to each other with as little overhead as possible. For MAG, that means cloud.

As a starting point for the interoperability phase, the ERP was lifted and shifted into SAP Private Cloud Edition, this time with the help of SAP Services under a RISE with SAP contract. The migration was completed in nine months, becoming operational at the end of 2022. The next step is to upgrade the underlying database from HANA 2.0 to S/4HANA as soon as business conditions allow, as Alkunshalie explained to Computing at a recent SAP Sapphire event.

"We have the ability to migrate to S4 within the contract, and that aligns to our longer term roadmap," he said. "That's our plan for ERP, and we feel that being a RISE customer will help us to accelerate that when the time comes."

Streamlining and standardisation

To avoid operational cul-de-sacs, Alkunshalie is keen to stick to standard business practices and default configurations wherever possible. While airports do have some unique domain requirements in terms of security, partnerships and customer-facing systems, in the main MAG's needs are much the same as those of any large enterprise. This is where being able to lean on the broad experience of a partner is particularly valuable.

"When you're talking about people journeys, HR processes, finance processes, or procurement processes, basically we can learn from someone who's done it before," he said.

"Adhering to standard functionality enables better data, and standardising data is absolutely key. It drives better insights, better data-driven decision-making, and ultimately, it creates efficiency across the organisation. It also means we can take advantage of standard functionality."

Avoiding the customisation and one-off configurations that inevitable lead to silos is key, he went on.

"We are cloud-first across the Group Technology products, so we should be leveraging best practice and out-of-the box functionality," Alkunshalie explained. "That's a core principle for us."

In parallel with moving the ERP system to the cloud, Alkunshalie's team has been focused on rationalising MAG's HR processes for its 40,000 employees, integrating SAP SuccessFactors and other cloud-based applications such as Kronos. The aim: to handle seamlessly every aspect of the "employee journey" from the first day to the final pay-cheque, through transforming the HR department as well as the tools.

"We're starting to see the rewards of that now," Alkunshalie said. "We're starting to see streamlined processes, joining up the data so we truly creating the efficiency in the process, removing waste."

Integration, integration, integration

An ERP is an enterprise cornerstone, but many organisations are wary of building the rest of their systems from one vendor's bricks, fearing lock in. If "standardisation" is Alkunshalie's favourite word, "integration" runs it a close second. He sees partnerships developing in the cloud between vendors who compete elsewhere as being overwhelmingly positive.

"To see key partners such as Microsoft or SAP work in collaboration is only going to benefit me, with open APIs to enable that integration, and enabling me as a technology leader to join up those systems to create efficiency and unlock value."

This sets the stage for a whole new step on the journey, improving the user experience.

"To be able to access HR processes and HR experiences through Teams with people not having to leave the application to get into the HR system would absolutely invaluable. I'd like to see more of that happening," he said.

First though, attention is being turned to Procurement, rationalising supply chain processes and linking them up to the newly cloudified ERP. Once again, the goal is standardisation and removing waste. Once again, there is much to be learned from industry best practice.

Then it will be the turn of Finance. Digitisation is about people processes and technology, and this is a case in point, Alkunshalie said. The planned upgrade will need to wait on some operational changes.

"S4 involves quite a move to standardisation and standard practice across finance. That's the business transformation. That's the bit that we're doing at the moment. That's the biggest step-change for the organisation."

Indeed, many IT leaders have discovered to their cost that the ambitious technology journeys can end in failure if not planned with business processes at the centre.

"The technical migration is the relatively easy part," said Alkunshalie ruefully. "Not easy, but relatively easy."

Nevertheless, he said he was confident that the finance step would be complete within the next two or three years.

"The leadership are fully supportive, and it is part of our roadmap."